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Music Media

XMMS 1.0.0 Released 122

Posted by CmdrTaco from the everybody-likes-to-hear-emm-pee-threes dept.
Olle Hällnäs wrote in to tell us that XMMS (the premiere GUI MP3 player for Linux these days) has released v1.1.0. Currently they only have rpms and source on the Web site, but I'm sure debs will follow. I've attached a feature list if you read more.
  • CD Plugin now supports CDDB, and CD Index.
  • mpg123 plugin now handles compressed id3 frames.
  • OSS plugin got a much better and faster resampling routine.
  • Setting for adjusting master volume instead of pcm volume.
  • New shortkey, ctrl-n for "No Playlist Advance"
  • XMMS can now be made "sticky"
  • The Equalizer and Playlist don't show up in GNOME/KDE's task list anymore.
  • Reload skin shortkey (F5)
  • Option to set the speed of the mousewheel.
  • Playlist files are now tried to be recognized by content in addition to suffix.
  • Added Fullscreen support for visualization plugins. (in libxmms)
  • Added DGA support to fullscreen.
  • Added xmms-config command.
  • XMMS now handles winamp's .wsz skin files.
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XMMS 1.0.0 Released More

XMMS 1.0.0 Released

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  • If you have a read through the xmms forums you will find that the xmms crew are going to start work on a new skin/theme format simmilar to Kjofol, but more powerful, this may be what youre after :)
  • Check that you have the correct output plugin selected in xmms.
    I'f you're using Gnome, chances are that you already have the Enlightenment sound deamon (esd) up and running. In that case use the ESD plugin (if it isn't there, install the xmms-esd package. If it doesn't work with ESD try the OSD output plugin. Should work in KDE.

  • What about GQMpeg? That support real 'themes'...
  • I saw something very similar. I'm running Red Hat 6.1 on an Intel and was using the 0.9.5 version of XMMS. Now I can't play my mp3s. I can't work w/o me mp3s! Help!
  • My specific problem is that it couldn't find the configure thingy for mikmod. I was hoping to be able to recycle the previous libs, but it didn't quite work out. Actually, I copied some wraper thingy over and it bitched about not being able to find a bunch of .o's. oops :)
  • I used to use GQMpeg back when xmms crashed every 5 minutes. Then I used xmms briefly to listen to shoutcast, but never had a use for the visualization plugins. My biggest quandary was the number of buttons which give no indication of their function. Now I use Broadcast 2000 for everything. It's big and overkill but it's easy to use.
  • Generally, I only use xmms for show. mpg123 is *so* much more convenient.
    First, run
    find /mp3 -name '*.mp3' >/usr/local/share/mp3list
    (adjust the path if needed). Then, you only need to run
    mpg123 -Z -@ /usr/local/share/mp3list
    to run your jukebox which plays all your MP3s randomly! If you never play games, you can even add the second line to /etc/rc.d/rclocal :-)
    Note: you could use the result of find(1) directly in conjunction with xargs(1), but if you file list does not change to often, saving it to a file is faster.
  • I run it on a K6/2-200 with 128 Meg and I've seen the same behaviour. The CPU usage spikes when it's first started, then settles down to a more reasonable 8-10%, with occassional bumps into the 20's and dips under 5.

    What I have seen is X slow to a crawl with XMMS running. While I'm only running a 2Meg video card, I always thought it was a little odd that X slowed as much as it did with the CPU load that low.

    Of course, if I want -real- sound, I leave the computer room behind, fire up the stereo, and the let Boston Acoustics rattle the light fixtures...
  • In gqmpeg, the general preference tab allows you to "enable Window Manager decorations. This will let you do exactly what you want. Coincidentally, if you use enlightenment, you can override the border settings of any window, with about a dozen types to choose from.
  • i dont use x much and dont want the extra load of something i'm not going to look at, so i stick to command line players. normally i use amp [unc.edu], but for the extra functionality of a playlist and an ncurses based interface i use gamp [umn.edu]. gamp is still in the early stages and occasionally wont play certain tracks, but it is a good start. I hope to finish some improvements to it and get a new version up soon.

    Russ
  • Guess what the 'x' in xmms stands for?
  • I'm still rather new to Linux, I'm happy with my setup except for one thing. I'm an MP3 nut, and I use two soundcards and a DJ mixer for mixing. This is a simple setup under Win, but I don't know how to get Linux to install two seperate sound devices. Has anyone had success setting up a second soundcard?
  • Just turn your case on its side, attach platter, arm, needle and viola!

    Wow----A PLAYER VIOLA!!!
  • The price is $99 - a little expensive I think.
  • It's Geiss by Ryan Geiss.

    I once emailed the guy about Linux support or the possibility of obtaining the source - no reply at all... :(

    Which sucks because there are a helluva lot of modifications I'd love to make to Geiss in addition to a Linux port. (None to the graphical portion, but to the UI portion - I'm taking a class called "Introduction to Digital Music" and it would be really cool to be able to control a vis plugin with MIDI commands embedded in a Digital Performer (Yes, it's using a Mac) project. Geiss is cool, but it would be awesome if you could "script" specific waveform/color/screen combos for different pieces of music automatically.
  • Go to http://www.alsa-project.org/ - They support a different set of cards than OSS (lots of overlap, but you NEED ALSA for a Trident 4DWave chipset - which is good because ALSA is much better than OSS.) In addition, they have full support for multiple soundcards/system.
  • I tried smartplay, but since it creates a matrix of all your MP3's it takes about 10 minutes to load/save its database of my 2000 MP3's. Cool idea, though.

  • go to:

    http://freshmeat.net [freshmeat.net]

    learn it; live it; love it.

    and search for mpg123 while you're there.

    --

  • Is a higher bitrate mp3 with noise distortion intact better than the lower bitrate mp3 with no outside distortion?

    I'll take the higher bitrate almost always. its closer to what the original source was - good and bad sound all included.

    What about CAT5 and a 386 laptop

    you still have the sound of the local drive starting and stopping. unless you run from ram[disk] only - which is an option; but then again, 386 laptops usually don't have much ram to run from!

    my idea is to use some kind of remote 'console' in my "quiet playing room" and keep the bulky storage system somewhere else. the lp3 device helps with playback; we need only a remote display and controller. for that, you can sneak by with a matrix orbital style LCD display http://matrix-orbital.com [matrix-orbital.com]. this is connected via a simple rs232 serial cable. and if you get the one with a keypad interface, you have both input and output ability. define some buttons to be pause, play, ff, etc, etc and write some code to display current song/status and you're all set. a very quiet remote controller (no noise at all) and a very quiet and clean audio output driver.

    --

  • Sonique, while it looks pretty and actually plays .mods correctly(which winamp doesn't), has a pretty damn bad interface

    not to take this too far, but the sonique gui is about the best i've seen, as far as being both useful, easy, and cool as all hell. Some flash sites are about as close as i've seen (www.globz.com).

    The knobs are awesome, click on a knob, move a mouse, seems pretty simple to me. The plugin/skin loading is two clicks (from 'net to screen) and works flawlessly. It's also improved (like all software should, M$) a lot over the past two releases. Still some quibbles, and a couple bugs, but it's a nice microbrew (free beer) and is sooo easy on the eyes.

  • Why is it that every graphical MP3 players has to have its own "special" look? I want my title bar, dammit!

    I agree!

    I use XMMS, and I think it has a pretty nice UI, but it's complete lunacy that they felt the need to implement window management in an MP3 player!

    Developers, if you want k-rad eleet title bars, use a k-rad eleet window manager. If you want to write a window manager, write a window manager. But don't force this inconsistency (in both appearance and functionality) on everybody who just wants to run an MP3 player. You aren't writing an ``MP3 Desktop'', you're just writing a damned app.

    gkrellm does the same thing, and it's equally crazy.

  • I use amp 0.7.6 by tomislav uzelac (search freshmeat.net/appindex) -- seems to work fine for me...
    If I have a lot of stuff going in the background, I often do:
    nice -n-20 amp "[artist] song.mp3"
  • I noticed that version 1.0.0 doesn't support Aureal. Darn. And I just installed Aureal drivers. I also noticed several comments telling about version 1.0.1 which should be a bug fix for this problem. But I can't find any information about the bugfix or any link for downloading it.

    I'm searching the fix from www.xmms.org (should be the right place, right?)

  • They use mpg123 for playing.

  • breaks Qsound IQ plugin (Score:4)

    by tweek ( 18111 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @04:48AM (#1328842) Homepage Journal
    For those of you who bought this killer plugin, the new version breaks it. Of course all you have to do is:

    ln -s /usr/lib/libxmms.so.1.0.0 /usr/lib/libxmms.so.0

    your location may be different for the libs but none the less that will fix it.

    This is one example of why I really like to have the source code whenever possible. All I would need to do was recompile against the new libraries. But again, I bought this plugin just because it made things sound SOOO much sweeter.
  • It's 1.0.0 (You can find out by going to their website :)
  • There is actually a plugin for K-Jöfol skins, just see under Vizualization plugins at the XMMS Plugin Page [xmms.org]
    ---
    Ilmari
  • I was quite disappointed with the plugin contest -
    while I coulnd't do better myself, I was hoping for some better plugins. The best winamp plugin, IMHO, is gueiss (or whatever the spelling is).
    It's a great way to relax with music...


    Anyone got the skills to code it???? :)
  • Did it actually play the song? Did you hear sound?

    I've noticed that sometimes XMMS (when first installed) defaults to the disk writer plugin, which would do exactly what you describe, with no output sound.

    Another possible problem is the sound driver. I use the OpenSound Aureal drivers, and if you don't select one of the ``virtual'' /dev/audio's, the track plays just a little fast.. Not enough to make it worthless, but enough to be noticible and annoying.

    Personally - I find xmms to be more convenient than mpg123. I have a private web server that creates playlists from a pointy-clicky javascript tree - and netscape spawning xmms works great. I know that mpg123 could do the same thing, but I don't wanna open an xterm to do it.. and xmms is prettier.

    -Jeff
  • I have AMD K6/2-300. Not exactly the fastest machine. When xmms starts playing a song the CPU load is at 12-14%. Then, after a few seconds, it goes down to well below 1%. Often you can't even see xmms in top. Perhaps you are trying to run it on a 486?
    ___

  • Completely Irresponsible (Score:3)

    by Lazaru5 ( 28995 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @06:47AM (#1328848)
    "Olle Hällnäs wrote in to tell us that XMMS (the premiere GUI MP3 player for Linux these days"



    Do you have any idea how hard it is to undo this? Any Linux user who may be thinking about trying other Unices will take this to mean that XMMS isn't "for" _insert_other_unix_system_here_. It's not intentional I know, and the message is completely subliminal.

    Open Source isn't just a catch phrase, it means "./configure && make install". To say that XMMS, or any other program that compiles WITHOUT MODIFICTATION from source is "for Linux" undermines the spirit of Open Source.

    This is a big issue for me. I'm a FreeBSD user (I use Linux on my workstation at work, and as a MP3 server at home) and #FreeBSD volunteer and Ports Maintainer, and the "Can I get _insert_open_source_program_here_ for FreeBSD?" gets really annoying.

    Even if the question is "There's not an [RPM|DEB] for _insert_open_source_program_here_ for Linux, how can I get it?" (And I've seen this on #Linux) I still think it's important that people realize what it's all about.

  • I've noticed that sometimes XMMS (when first installed) defaults to the disk writer plugin, which would do exactly what you describe, with no output sound.

    This was correct; it was happily dumping my mp3s to .wav files in my home directory!

    Useful, to be sure, but a little hard to get used to. :)

    If you have this problem, go to Options/Preferences/Output Plugin and select the OSS Driver plugin as your output device. All should be well now.

  • The price is $99 - a little expensive I think

    ever price a high-end sound card?

    soundblaster live is about $100 (the 'value' edition). and its still noisier than this dongle since the analog 'tronics are too close to the computer bus.

    to get really pure sound, you have to use a digital audio (spdif) card. those start at $400. then you need an external DAC - figure at least $100 for a used one; $300 for a new one. and you STILL don't have a hardware mp3 decoder. not that you really need one but that's extra value you get on this dongle thingie.

    after a few weeks of living with the lp3 device, I'd say it comes 90% as close as the spdif solution I just listed. and at a fraction of the price.

    the ONLY downside is that you can't pump regular audio thru it - it has to be .mp3 format. I'm guessing that the reason they can get away with a printer port interface is that the audio bandwidth (compressed) can fit in the /dev/lp channel. full digital 44.1/16 audio would certainly not fit in a printer port channel.

    one more thought: suppose you use your main computer to store the hundreds of megs (or gigs!) of mp3 files and that system is noisy with fans, chattering disk drives, etc. so you put that machine in your spare room. but you want to listen to your tunes in the bedroom or livingroom. with a conventional analog card, you'd have to run analog wiring for the long distance run. this is lossy and picks up hum. with this device, I would need to run the same length of cable, and it would have to be parallel cable (a bit more expensive and bulky) but its a digital run and not an analog run, so there's zero loss and zero hum pickup. you then place the dongle very close to the preamp of your stereo and bingo: you have extremely low-loss and very high fidelity.

    (this is precisely what I intend to do for my hi-end listening room)

    --

  • I haven't tried it with the latest version, but while testing the Aureal driver last week with XMMS 0.9.5.1, I had to turn off its "use realtime priority"; otherwise XMMS segfaults. My SB Gold doesn't have problem either way. megumi
  • tell your friend running winamp to go get sonique and you can be jealous again. I keep bugging them for a linux version, but my bug isn't loud enough.
  • Maybe they should have used the defaults from the previous version. Another problem is that it does not find the skins in /usr/local/share/xmms/Skins. This also worked fine before.
    Xmms would be neat if one could choose several directories for shuffle play... does anyone know whether this is possible? Otherwise I'll stick to mpg123...
  • But is the cost of the LCD and keypad cheaper than a used 386/486 laptop? I wasn't advocating using the built in sound on the laptop (gawd no! SB/16 clones that sound like saws!), but using the laptop to run the dongle. Mount a NFS share from the base PC. You get the nicely noise insulated sound AND a cheap controller. Another advantage of the laptop would be possible addition of an IR transmitter, to control the variety of equipment one inevitably has in his/her sound rack. (Hell, wire a IR LED to the serial port and modulate the port in software..)
  • According to CmdrTaco, the version number seems to keep falling. It's gone from 1.1.0 to 1.0.0, apparently in the time it takes to write two sentences.

    I can't wait for better performance and stability at version 0.1.3-pre5! Open source software has such funny version numbering. I can't wait to see Emacs hit version number parity with the current year, either...
  • I noticed that xmms wouldn't work with my Aureal card when using OSS for the output, but worked fine using eSound....
  • try sonique with the "CoR's Cosmic Belt" vis, unless of course you don't like seeing cosmic tornadoes dancin' through the universe to whatever vibrations your heart desires.

  • Reading comprehension skills... (Score:3)

    by osu-neko ( 2604 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @10:25AM (#1328860)
    "Olle Hällnäs wrote in to tell us that XMMS (the premiere GUI MP3 player for Linux these days"

    Do you have any idea how hard it is to undo this? Any Linux user who may be thinking about trying other Unices will take this to mean that XMMS isn't "for" _insert_other_unix_system_here_. It's not intentional I know, and the message is completely subliminal.

    No, it's not true that any Linux user will read that as meaning it's only available for Linux. Only those with poor reading comprehension skills.

    If someone reads the correct statement "Netscape is the most popular web browser for Linux these days" as meaning "Netscape is only available for Linux", they have poor reading skills. Likewise, if someone read the quoted statement as meaning XMMS is only available for Linux, they too have poor reading skills.

    How do we undo this? Better education in the schools, perhaps? I don't know. But I don't think refraining from making accurate and factual statements because they might be misinterpretted is the answer.

    --

  • You need to check your glasses! After 99 minutes it switches to 1:40 not 1:00! Please don't post this patch again!
  • i.e. instead of "hitting skip on a crappy song, going back to work, getting another topics crappy song and needing to quit work (mentally) to skip it" you can just skip all the shit at once. Well, WADR, the problem is between the keyboard and the chair. "Hitting skip" is not the way to solve the problem of unwanted songs in your playlist. "Deleting the song from the playlist" is the solution. c.f. Larry Wall on "true laziness."

    --
  • After 99 minutes it switches to 1:40 not 1:00!

    still not exactly what you would expect...
  • If you had read what he said, it also uses a neural net to detect your mood. So maybe you don't want to hear the song now, but you want to hear it when you are feeling different. Plus, you can hit skip on a bunch of upcoming songs, not just the current one that is playing, like with your method.

  • Bug Fix (Score:3)

    by shitface ( 121619 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @03:33AM (#1328868) Homepage Journal

    There is at least one known bug for XMMS 1.0.0. The XMMS website says:

    • If you own a Aureal soundcard and are using the Aureal drivers, XMMS 1.0.0 will not work. This bug has been fixed in CVS and XMMS 1.0.1 will be released later today.
  • Make sure that you rebuild and replace the libraries if you're upgrading. I tried to just replace my executable, and it completely blew up. And I'm too lazy to figure out how to get all the libs I want to compile, so I'll go back to work now and wait for the debian packages to arrive.

  • there is no other method to install a MESA visual plugin other than RPM. The RPM is built against the XMMS 1.0.0 RPM (which wouldn't install due to another lib dependancy that I didn't feel like chasing down) so AFAIK if you didn't install the XMMS RPM you can't use the XMMS MESA plugin to do some cool fullscreen stuff :(
  • Ideally, I'd like to see a command-line version (is there one??) I have tried others - mpg123, for example, but had problems with half my MP3 collection due to funny sample rates etc. :-(

    Does anyone have any suggestions? That decoder routine swallows 25% of the CPU in the previous version! Would I be better converting them to compressed WAV-type files for playback, given that I have plenty of disk space?

  • And God said, "Let there be an MP3 playter that actually works, on an OS that actually works, and let it not be plagued by stupid lawsuits brought about by greed megalomaniac entertainment conglomerates."

    And God looked upon the MP3 player , and saw that it was good.

    Way to go, programmers!

  • So is it 1.1.0 or 1.0.0 that was just released? Guessing 1.0.0.

  • You can use the perl plugin for xmms to control it from the command line. Alternatively, you could get Freeamp, which is GPL and has a command-line interface (as well as a graphical one).

    If you use freeamp, the syntax is:

    freeamp -ui freeampcmd blah.mp3
  • Woohoo!
    XMMS does rock, but ... does anyone else experience weird CPU usage when running XMMS ? It checks up 99% of CPU on some machines I've run it on? Is it just tricking 'top' or something else ?
  • Support for .wmz skins? Right on. Now I can get all those cool skins that my friend has on his Winamp. Next feature to look for? An anti-sysadmin mp3 disguising tool specifically for those that like to put mp3s on their school's servers...

  • I woundered what version it was when I saw the news. Since I hadn't heard of a 1.0.0 release, I guessed it was that (and not 1.1.0), but I checked the homepage of xmms, and what did I find? 1.0.1 =)

    1.0.0, 1.1.0 or 1.0.1. It all looks so digital ;c)
  • Are we going to get some realy nifty playlist control. And crossfading output. Or have I not RTM properly? :)
  • I snagged 1.0.0 as soon as I could get it. I also snagged the Aureal drivers last weekend.

    Everything is working fine. Odd. I'll have to check which version I have when I get home.

    Or perhaps I've been listening to the same songs for so long that I'm starting to hear them when I sit down in front of the computer. :P
    --
  • The XMMS competition is over.

    The winner was the xmms-speakers with jakedaw and kint following.
    Personally I liked Blursk the most. :-)


    ---
    The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck,

  • <gripe>
    Why is it that every graphical MP3 players has to have its own "special" look? I want my title bar, dammit!
    </gripe>

    I've got three of these on my system (freeamp, gqmpeg, and now xmms) and I don't use any of them, because of this -- mpg123 in an xterm is less painful.

  • I'm sure the RIAA will try to sue them over some silly shit. Probably try to claim music distribution is a trade secret or something like that.

  • EEK! (Score:1)

    by SendBot ( 29932 )
    Well, I went ahead without mikmod support. It plays mp3's about 6 times as fast, with no audible output, and dies shortly afterward. And I don't have that sound card that breaks it either.
  • Features: it uses random play but it displays the list of the next 20 songs it will play and allows you to remove them from the queue at any time, i.e. instead of "hitting skip on a crappy song, going back to work, getting another crappy song and needing to quit work (mentally) to skip it" you can just skip all the shit at once.

    You can do that with XMMS too:

    Misc Options->Sort List->Randomize List and then delete the songs you don't want...

  • I use Winamp for linux, am I the only one? I was quite happy when I discovered that there was a linux version on my redhat disk. It works fine.

  • Re:Nice.... (Score:3)

    by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @05:43AM (#1328889) Homepage Journal
    When you go to download a .wsz skin, simply rename it to have a .zip extension and save it in your skins directory. A wsz file is simply a zip file renamed to be associated with WinAmp in a Win32 environment.
  • Anyone have any issues getting this to run with a sound blaster live? I keep getting "Can Not Open Audio", but everything else seems to work with the beta drivers from Creative ( yes i /did/ install them ) And it seems to play CDs just fine, but i can't get MP3s to work...simple issue of two totally different methods maybe? ( That's my uninformed guess, that the MP3 has to go though some sort of decoding and that the CDs kind of get decoded through the CDROM and just get piped straight out of the card, but what do i know? ) Ah well, anyone running Linux with an SBLive that has gotten this to work?

    this sig is not here

  • I prefer hardware decoding (Score:5)

    by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @05:47AM (#1328891)
    and a command-line player. gui shoomey ;-)

    there's a neat little hardware dongle thingie at:

    http://lp3music.com [lp3music.com]

    the only limitation is that it can't decode mp3's beyond 192k. that is a bummer - but if you try 192k mode on a good encoder (blade-enc is fine at that rate), you'll be very surprised at the quality; especially with this external decoder unit.

    it has the advantage of all the analog electronics being outside the PC. less clock noise and hum = cleaner sound. oh, and since the decode is in hardware, your cpu util. is almost nil. and the best part is that it only needs a printer port - not an ISA or PCI slot. so its perfect for laptops. even older 386 laptops!

    oh, and yes, there is linux support for this. they provide links for linux sourcecode to drive this. and there's even some work being done to make this an xmms plug-in; for those who insist on a ooey-gui.

    ob disc: I'm just a customer who enjoys this hardware product. I had nothing to do with the design, implementation or anything else for that matter

    --

  • Shit!!! Once Again I'm doing a BTDTBTS Post...

    The preliminary release of my liveice plugin for XMMS was just put up today at http://star.arm.ac.uk/~spm/software/liveice-xmms.t ar.gz

    For the brave only...
  • hrm, not here. it's eating up 90% like god meant it to be :)
  • tell your friend running winamp to go get sonique and you can be jealous again. I keep bugging them for a linux version, but my bug isn't loud enough.
    Sonique, while it looks pretty and actually plays .mods correctly(which winamp doesn't), has a pretty damn bad interface, with a bad case of "I-really-want-to-look-like-a-hand-held-player-iti s". For example, you have to move the knobs with your mouse, while knobs in real life are designed to be frobbed with one's finger. You can't frob a knob on a screen with your fingers, which makes it a pain. Sliders would be a much better choice. And want to, say, use the equalizer while looking at the spectral analyzer? Too bad. Sonique's interface won't let you. You can cycle through playlist to equalizer to spectral analyzer, but you can't view any of them at the same time.
    IMHO, the only thing sonique has over winamp is that it plays mods correctly, and xmms already plays mods correctly.
  • XMMS is not just an mp3 player. With the aid of the mikmod libraries, it is
    also a mod file player(that's the music kind of mod file, as in the stuff at the hornet archive [hornet.org]). Given the
    right plugin, it is also a viable alternative to many hallucinogens :)
  • Is there a good commandline player for MP3's? It seems kind of silly that a pre-requisite for listening to MP3s is X....

  • Thanks! I've got a couple of DX-4 laptops that I use regularly, and while they're fast enough to decode mp3's, they don't have any sound capability. There has never been a real market for PCMCIA sound cards, so the ones still on the market are $289 and come with all sorts of fancy professional A/V features..

    Looks like this little devil will solve my problem!
  • Well, on my system, performance is great when I am using the OSS plugin, but it's not quite as good when using the Esound plugin. I get less than 1% CPU utilization and generally faster performance with OSS, and 6-7% CPU utilization and slower performance with the Esound plugin. This is on a 300 Mhz PowerPC G3 with LinuxPPC. I have also built the binary myself from the latest CVS build.
  • Err, SPDIF out is becoming pretty standard on cheap sound cards. I have a Xitel Platinum with TOSLINK out at up to 48kHz and it was about $70. The SB Live MP3 has coax SPDIF out and costs about the same. Also see Hoontech 4D Wave and many others...

    I have also seen a soundcard with TOSLINK in & out for $150, but unfortunately I don't recall the name.
  • Idle cycles are wasted cycles. :)

    --

  • What about CAT5 and a 386 laptop? Then not only do you get the noise isolation offered by the dongle, the capability to play at a remote location, but you get local control or what is played. You don't want to have to run down to the computer to flip the track. Plus, most of the run is cheap ethernet.

    One concern I would have is the device limits the sample rate of the mp3 played. Is a higher bitrate mp3 with noise distortion intact better than the lower bitrate mp3 with no outside distortion?
  • oooo!!! I like the idea!
  • You can do the same thing in XMMS, at least you can with the early 0.9 I'm still using. (it works! Why replace it!) Then just load it up as a playlist, and you're good to go!
  • The knobs are awesome, click on a knob, move a mouse, seems pretty simple to me. No, that's not my point. It is simple. It's also stupid. You can't click on a point on a knob and have it move to that value, as you can with a slider or something else. My point was that the sonique interface enforces physical limitations where they aren't needed. I suggest reading up on interface design at a sight like this one [iarchitect.com].

  • Version 1.0.1 is supposed to be on the CVS server right now, if you don't know how to download from it just read the help they have on their site :)
  • but the spdif on the SB cards is resampled!! and not even well implemented ;-(

    so, by definition, its not pure. and its jittery as hell. only marginally better than normal analog.

    --

  • I think exactly the opposite. When I hear "X is available for Linux" I think "Cool, that means it probably will run under Solaris too." Then I go to the site/read the README/attempt to compile and run to find out if it actually does work under Solaris.

  • I tried smartplay, but since it creates a matrix of all your MP3's it takes about 10 minutes to load/save its database of my 2000 MP3's. Cool idea, though.

    Hehe.. I keep it to under 600 mp3s, but it still takes a long time. I guess implementing an O(n^2) algorithm in perl was not a good idea. :)

    Well that's why I only claim it to be ``proof of concept.'' It would be nice if one of the real players picks up the idea and dose some real research into the AI side of it too.. and writing stuff in C instead of Perl. Unfortunatly, I have almost no time for this sort of thing.. graduate school eats all my time.

    There are also neet things that can be done with AI players on the net which talk among themselves and share songs, i.e. your player makes recomendations to your friends players. It would be a kind of radio that everyone contributed "taste" to, but no one had to put in the time to DJ. It could send out the recommendation once you lissened to the song. You friends system would track how much they liked recommendations from you just like they track mp3s. Unfortunatly, I do not know enough AI or psychology to pull this off, but [addressing everyone] if you are an AI, computer interfaces, or psychology type person then this could make a cool project.

    The goal of our user interfaces should be to keep us from waisting our lives screwing arround with the time consuming parts.

    Jeff
  • if you are an AI, computer interfaces, or psychology type person then this could make a cool project.

    I'm working on an MSc in AI, and I'm currently hashing out details of a project proposal for exactly this sort of thing.

    A major problem with Smartplay is that it doesn't generalize. When it learns something about one song, that doesn't contribute to its knowledge about other songs. That's what I want to fix. I don't expect to be able to make a program that understands all the nuances of what makes one song like another, but I think I can make something that correlates at least a little to some of people's similarity measures, and that's better than nothing.

    The first task is extracting features from the audio. I have a bunch of ideas, but limited time here (where I can get help from clueful professors), and I'd like to have all the feature extractors done before the official start of my project (in April). I'm going to GPL everything I write. If anyone wants to help out, drop me a line [mailto].

  • thats why I'll stick with gqmpeg/mpg123 for now.
    For awhile xmms will do fine...but then every once in a while it'll just up to %50 CPU usage...thats on a dual 400, so I don't think that is right!

  • Watch out! (Score:3)

    by Oscarfish ( 85437 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @03:49AM (#1328914) Homepage
    Good ol' RIAA [riaa.org] might be after the developers. Let's follow their logic:

    "XMMS runs on Linux." + "Hackers use Linux." = "Hackers use XMMS"

    "Hackers use XMMS" + "XMMS plays MP3 files" = "Hey, it's the DeCSS of the music industry!"

    I called Vegas and the odds are 2:1 in favor of a DeCSS'ish string of arrests [slashdot.org] before the day is out. Buckle up everybody! Mirror sites, I pray for you [slashdot.org]! :)

  • these are the apps (Score:3)

    by DjReagan ( 143826 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @03:52AM (#1328915)
    Its this sort of application that is helping bring Linux to the mainstream. The office suites have been out for a little while now. The linux games are starting to sprout up all over the place, and now the multimedia and entertainment utilities are coming through as finished, professional products. Assuming we can get the MPAA off our backs about the CSS fiasco, we're well on the way to being a system that is not only good for the hackers, but useful for the end-user also.
    --

  • Skins are NOT themes.. (Score:3)

    by Weezul ( 52464 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @03:52AM (#1328916)
    I must say I have been really disapointed with the tendency of OSS mp3 player to just copy winamp's skinability. The truth is skins are a really lame form of user configuration because they make it more difficult to change the interface in meaningful ways (as opposed to E themes or something where you actually do reconfigure the interface).

    Now, you ask "who would want to change the interface to their mp3 player?" Well there are a lot of reasons, but they mostly boil down to (1) playlists are a waist of time and (2) you will waist you life away skipping songs you are not in the mood to hear if you use random play. I wrote an mpg123 front end called smartplay [gtf.org] using perl/gtk which tries to fix these problems. Warning: this is ``proof of concept'' which means it will probable crash sometimes. Features: it uses random play but it displays the list of the next 20 songs it will play and allows you to remove them from the queue at any time, i.e. instead of "hitting skip on a crappy song, going back to work, getting another crappy song and needing to quit work (mentally) to skip it" you can just skip all the shit at once. Also, it tracks you lissening patterns to try and opimize it's random file selector to your mood as determined to the kinds of songs you have been lissening to compleatly.

    Jeff
  • Same problem here; I really wish Linux programmers weren't quite as keen about always using the newest libraries.

  • Official Press Release and ChangeLog (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Press Release [xmms.org]
    ChangeLog [xmms.org]
  • The Radiola company announced the release of a new hardware kit that allows your Linux box to play vinyl records! Just turn your case on its side, attach platter, arm, needle and viola! You can be listening to Frampton Comes Alive in no time! No need to wait for pesky downloads and no fear of grubbing music industry lawyers lookin' to throw the book at ya! Get one now before the other kids on the block have one!
  • It also generates scadloads of X traffic, even when it's idle in winshade mode.

  • Solaris plugin (Score:3)

    by larien ( 5608 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @04:01AM (#1328922) Homepage Journal
    For those interested, I'll be updating the Solaris plugin [rgu.ac.uk] to work with 1.0.x releases either today or by Monday at the latest (disasters at work notwithstanding).
    --
  • Skins can give you the basic look and feel of any interface you want for your XMMS / WinAmp player.

    XMMS uses WinAmp skins, and a huge mass of them are available at winamp.com [winamp.com].
    As much as all you linux junkies hate going to anything with Win in the title :), there's some good stuff there... you can find just about anything. Or go to a search engine and search for "winamp skins".

    Personally, I've found the BeAmp skin gives a good BeOS feel, if you want something that's like standard GUI widgets.
    There are also nicer skins with custom UI's-- the Fusion based ones are nice, I believe one of those is XMMS's base skin (it is in the version I have, anyway), or try X-perienze for a quasi-futuristic look.

    You can always design your own skin too.
    --
    Talon Karrde
  • To my best knowledge, there is no Winamp for Linux. What you may be using is a program called xmms, formerly known as x11amp, that looks and feels like Winamp (and can use its themes).

    But it's an entirely different program, and in contrast to Winamp fully GPL, which is why it sometimes get's its own thread on sites like Slashdot.
    Hope this clears up things a bit.

  • Use the Source, Luke (Score:3)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @06:22AM (#1328928)
    You can easilly download the sourcecode and add a feature, say a command-line --titlebar, or something. Wine has this capability (--window-managed or something like that) which allows the window manager to manage Wine windows, a feature I use whenever running wine as I hate the default WABIesque behavior of sticking to my virtual desktop.

    A similar feature for xmms shouldn't be that hard if you really want it, and a friendly suggestion to the developers might work wonders. Myself, I prefer not having title bars on my xmms, but freedom of choice is what Open Source is all about.
  • When I tried xmms (after stopping mpg123), it played the song at full speed (using 100% available CPU all the time, no timing), which means it took maybe ten seconds to play a five minute song :-)

    Did anyone experience such a bug, too?
  • I think it's more a case of the xmms libs need to be recompiled, not just the main binary. If you do ./configure;make;make install, you should be fine; .configure;make;cp xmms/xmms /usr/local/bin isn't going to be enough.
    --
  • From watching the XMMS-devel mailing list, I've heard about this a lot. It seems to be a symptom SMP systems, possibly in the sound drivers.
    --

  • Still one simple bug (Score:5)

    by Puppe ( 33682 ) on Friday January 28, 2000 @04:18AM (#1328934) Homepage
    I've mailed the xmms team 2-3 times even with patches for this bug.

    The timer thinks 1 hour is 99 minutes, so after the timer passes 99:59 it says 1:00:00, but it should wrap after 59:59.

    Here is the fix

    --- main.c~ Mon Jan 24 20:11:01 2000
    +++ main.c Fri Jan 28 15:19:29 2000
    @@ -2640,7 +2640,7 @@
    stime_prefix = ' ';
    }
    t /= 1000;
    - if (t > 99 * 60)
    + if (t > 60 * 60)
    t /= 60;
    number_set_number(mainwin_10min_num, t / 600);
    number_set_number(mainwin_min_num, (t / 60) % 10);



    --- playlistwin.c~ Mon Jan 24 20:11:02 2000
    +++ playlistwin.c Fri Jan 28 15:20:01 2000
    @@ -1545,7 +1545,7 @@

    if (time 99 * 60)
    + if (time > 60 * 60)
    time /= 60;

    text = g_strdup_printf("%c%-2.2d", sign, time / 60);

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